Given the increasing interest in law among historians, especially in
women’s contact with legal institutions and the impact of their
legal status, this is an opportune time to extend the boundaries of
most classicists’ purview with an examination of women and law
at Dura-Europos. This paper explores women’s use of legal
documents and the impact of law upon notions of gender and ethnicity
at the edge of the Roman Empire. I argue that it is by looking at
legal documents that we are able to see women in the furthest corners
of the Roman Empire acting outside the gender role traditionally
ascribed to them and using a legal system that was alien, yet
adaptive to the native culture. Reading the work of Roman jurists
gives one the impression that women could not and did not use Roman
law and that Roman law appears to be culturally isolated. But to read
the documents from Dura-Europos is to realise that women were active
participants in law and that Roman legal practice blended with Greek
in the East to form a set of legal practices and procedures that
served the local population well.

Women,
regardless of where they were in the Roman Empire, were traditionally
considered incapable of participating in law. The jurist Paul in the
Digest (22.6.9pr) tells us: “Those under twenty-five are
allowed to be ignorant of the law. So are women in some cases, owing
to the infirmity of their gender.” For the same reason, they
were supposed to have guardians to represent them--they were, in
theory, treated like children. Nevertheless, women did participate in
law, despite their supposed ignorance and weakness.

There is a growing body of work on the
participation of women in law in the Roman world. I mention just a
few titles: Jane Gardner’s ground-breaking Women in Roman
Law and Society (1986), Susan Treggiari’s Roman
Marriage: iusti coniuges from the time of Cicero to the time of
Ulpian (1991), Antti Arjava’s Women
and Law in Late Antiquity (1996), and Judith Evans Grubbs’
recent sourcebook, Women and the Law in the Roman Empire
(2002), which is an invaluable resource for those interested in the
subject. Despite this interest, little attention has been paid to the
correlation between women’s participation in Roman
institutions, such as law, and their social and geographical milieu,
especially at the edge of the Roman Empire.

But the great collection of parchments and
papyri from Dura-Europos can contribute much to our understanding of
women’s experience of law. Macedonians, Parthians, and finally
Romans held this city on the Euphrates. Their successive domination
added to the diversity of the population, evidenced in the documents
which were written in Greek, Syriac and Latin, and which feature
parties with Greek, Semitic, and Roman names, all of whom,
nevertheless, came together in their use of law. I discuss four
documents preserved from the period of Roman control of AD 165 to
256,1
all of which feature women and count among the best preserved texts
from the site. Two of these documents concern familial matters
(marriage and divorce), and two concern business matters (sale and
deposit); these documents contain the sorts of legal agreements a
woman at Dura-Europos might expect to draw up during her life.

P.Dura 31 of AD 204 records the divorce
of Acozzis.2
She bore a Semitic name and, embodying the local diversity, was once
married to the Greek-named Lysias. She now sought a divorce from her
second husband, Nabusamaus (another Semitic name). The divorce
agreement is a double document, a type for which Dura-Europos is well
known. Double documents comprise two texts, one written below the
other. When rolled up, the lower text is concealed inside; the upper
is visible on the outside, the veracity of its contents guaranteed by
the hidden text. This form of document is similar to but more
elaborate than simply folding the papyri, the practice that succeeded
it in Egypt, and is found in this period only in the East. We have
examples of it also in the Babatha archive, which I shall discuss
shortly, and in the P.Euphrates collection.3

In P.Dura 31 the lower text is the full
original, containing stipulations and witnesses’ signatures. It
is, at times, garbled with many grammatical errors, suggesting bad
dictation to a scribe, or the scribe’s unfamiliarity with a
template. I doubt that the document was written by either of the
parties; the dictator or author of the template was probably a
notary. Normally the upper texts that appeared on the outside
contained simply a description of the type of document and witness
declarations. In P.Dura 31, however, we seem to have a
typographically and grammatically correct version of the lower,
inside text. It is in a different hand, probably the hand of the
official with whom the document was lodged, who seems to have gone
out of his way to make sure that the document made sense.

The lower, inside text opens with Roman dating,
“In the consulship
of Lucius Fabius Cilo for the second time
and of Flavius Annius Libo; in the twelfth year
of the reign of Imperator Caesar Lucius Septimius Severus Pertinax
Augustus, the tenth of Marcus AureliusAntoninus Augustus, and
the seventh of Lucius Septimius Geta Caesar, his sons,
Augusti,” followed by the local style of
dating--“in the year 515 of the former reckoning, on the
fourth of the month Artemisius.”
These two dating formulae at the beginning indicate the
multi-cultural nature of this document. Next, in lines 28-29, we see
the names of the parties, and those of their parents and
grandparents--“Nabusamaus son of Konon son of Abissaeus and
Acozzis daughter of Seleucus son of Abissaeus,” a mixture of
Semitic and Greek names. Acozzis and her husband had married under an
oral agreement (gegenesthai autois ton sunoikismon eti proteron
agraphôs, ll. 30-31), probably on the Greco-Syrian
model, as Syrian and Greek law held sway before the arrival of the
Romans. They now divorced without blame (ll. 37-38), leaving
each other free to remarry (ll. 34-7). Despite problems with
the text, the agreement made is legally sound and even includes
stipulations--binding affirmations that are quintessentially Roman
(ll. 51-55). One of the scribe’s errors, however, was to
place the parties’ stipulations not before, but in the middle
of the witness declarations that begin at line 49.

Acozzis and Nabusamaus’ divorce document
shares notable features with another example from Dura-Europos,
P.Dura 32 of AD 254: the parties, Amimma and Julius Antiochus,
give each other permission to remarry and agree not to make any
claims against each other in the future.4
But the circumstances of Acozzis and Nabusamaus’ marriage and
its dissolution are not so commonplace. Since the couple had
grandfathers of the same name, with no distinction such as a
patronymic made between them, it is reasonable to assume that they
were cousins. Unlike P.Dura 32, this document makes no
provision for the restoration of property. Welles et al. believe that
it would have been covered by a general release of all claims,5
though it is curious that no details were given for the division of
the cousins’ personal and familial property.6

We know from lines 53-54 that Acozzis had a
son, Barnaeus, who signed for her: “I, Barnaeus son of Lysias,
having been asked, wrote for my mother”). As her son must have
reached majority to be able to sign, she was probably in her 40s at
the time of the divorce. It seems strange that her second marriage,
as opposed to her first, should have been to her cousin. Such
dynastic unions were usually undertaken to preserve property and were
effective only with the production of children--but Acozzis and
Nabusamaus had no children (ll. 31-32). A possible explanation
for their union is that they were both either widowed or divorced,
with Nabusamaus no longer of an age to enter into a relationship that
would produce children. To prevent Acozzis living alone or having to
live with her son, perhaps she and her cousin were joined in a union
that would protect Acozzis, provide companionship, and safeguard both
parties’ family property. Although the union seemed ideal,
nevertheless human nature, manifested in the curiously sensitive term
dusare(s)teis (l. 32, which I translate as “a
lack of amiable cooperation”)
intervened and Acozzis and Nabusamaus could not bear to remain
together. Their failure to adhere to the subsequent divorce agreement
carried a heavy penalty--3,000 denarii in AD 204 compared with
1,000 denarii in P.Dura 32, dating to AD 254--perhaps
reinforcing the suggestion that theirs was a union meant to protect
family wealth.

Throughout the document, we see that Acozzis is
named directly as one of the parties: it seems that she had no
guardian acting for her. On the basis of statements by Paul, Gaius
and other jurists, it had been assumed that women could not be
parties to legal agreements or actions without guardians.7
But in the documents from Dura-Europos women act without guardians.

It had once been thought that Duran women were
pioneers, but the subsequent discovery of the documents comprising
the P.Euphrates collection prompted the suggestion that the
phenomenon belongs to the third century, not to Dura-Europos. This
collection, which includes public and private documents and letters
dating from AD 232-252, comes from the same region as Dura-Europos.
In it we find, for example, a petition written from a certain
Bathsabbatha, whose brother had been murdered and his possessions
stolen. She writes to the local centurion asking for his testimony
that her brother had been murdered, so that she can pursue his
murderer for return of the possessions. Bathsabbatha petitions
without a guardian; the reply is written below the petition and is
evidence that the local authorities were willing to accept legal and
administrative documents from women acting independently.

We now have more evidence: as far back as the
Hellenistic period, some Ethiopian women in Egypt acted without
guardians, except when they were involved in serious legal issues and
needed to emphasise their social standing. Then they used guardians,
just like Greek women in the community. Katelijn Vandorpe has
examined an archive of the second century BC belonging to a couple,
Dryton and Apollonia, and their offspring.8
She has found that Apollonia, a woman from a Greek family that had
lived in Egypt for two or three generations, married a Greek man
using a Greek legal document, perhaps to emphasise that she was part
of the elite Greek community. As a businesswoman, she drew up loan
contracts using both Greek and Egyptian-style documents, and it is
notable that she used Greek documents for loans of larger sums,
Egyptian documents for smaller sums.9
Also in the second century, we find another woman behaving like
Apollonia: in Egyptian documents she acts without a guardian and in
Greek documents with (for example, Pap.Lugd.Bat. 19.2 and 3 =
P.Batav. 2 and 3).10
Moving forward to the third century in the Roman period, we find
women asking for guardians (P.Oxy. 4.720 and 12.1466),
presumably so that their subsequent legal undertakings would be more
secure.11

Our assumption of a move in the third century
AD towards women’s legal independence seems to have been a
function of the evidence, not an accurate reflection of reality. In
Egyptian documents, generally women had always acted alone; in Greek
documents, they were inclined to use a guardian.

It is possible that from the time of the Roman
Republic only women of Greek and Roman origin had acted with
guardians, leaving all other indigenous women in Egypt and the Near
East to act independently when it suited them: in the second century
BC we find an Egyptian woman using Greek contracts but without a
guardian (Pap.Lugd.Bat. 19.6 = P.Batav. 6).12
We also find in 173 BC (P.Giss. 2) an Egyptian woman giving
herself in marriage, as was permissible in Egypt, though using a
Greek marriage agreement.13
But there were exceptions, such as Julia Crispina in the Babatha
archive. In P.Babatha 20 she appears as an episkopos, a
guardian, and in no document in the archive does she have a guardian
acting in her interests. If she is to be identified as the daughter
of the consul, as has been suggested, then perhaps her independence
is a sign of her elevated status, though this theory contradicts the
Roman jurists.14
If, however, she was a local woman of some standing, which is another
suggestion, then her independence could be explained by her Eastern
origins.15

The evidence for women and guardianship is
large and complicated. But the accumulated material of Egypt,
Dura-Europos, the Euphrates and Arabia suggests that guardianship of
women varied according to certain criteria and circumstances: social
standing, ethnicity, the extent of local Romanisation, and the
gravity of the legal problem.

As I mentioned above, in lines 53-55 we see
that Acozzis’ son Barnaeus signed for her. Parties to a
document often had someone sign on their behalf because they were
illiterate: in P.Dura 32, Aurelius Valentinus states that he
has written on behalf of Amimma who is described as being without
letters (agrammatou, l. 23). The rest of his statement
is very similar to that in P.Dura 31. It is rare to find women
who sign for themselves: in one document, a woman with the ius
trium liberorum makes a point of stating that she can act
independently and, moreover, that she has also signed for herself.16
It is most likely that a word similar to agrammatou was
accidentally omitted from P.Dura 31.

Clear indications of Roman law, as opposed to
Syrian or Greek, as a legal system, are absent from this document.
Roman law did not require marriage documents, or tabulae
nuptiales, and though they were common in the classical period in
the West, almost all surviving examples are from the East.
Evans-Grubbs in her sourcebook is forced to take examples of marriage
documents not from Italy, but from Egypt and the Near East.17
Also, marriage sine manu became the norm, that is, marriage in
which the woman was party to the agreement, not the subject of it.
Coincidentally, in the Greek East, outside of Greece itself, Greek
marriage law developed under Eastern influence to accept marriages as
valid even without written documentation and to regard marriage as an
agreement between a man and a woman, not the woman’s father or
guardian. These coincidences between Roman and Greek law must have
made using a legal document lodged with the Roman authorities
palatable, even easy, for Acozzis and her husband.

I suggest that Roman law, as opposed to Greek
or Syrian law, in P.Dura 31 is evidenced not by the appearance
of particular legal restrictions and formulations, but by indications
of certain ways of doing things, such as using stipulations, or
certain ways of arranging one’s affairs, such as using a
written document that was acceptable to the Roman authorities.
Dura-Europos was now a Roman city and so perhaps we can assume that
Acozzis and her husband felt that if they were to divorce, they
should do it with a written agreement that would carry weight with
the Roman authorities. Perhaps both parties had more to lose if their
document was not valid in the eyes of officials: they were older and
they probably had property (though none is explicitly mentioned),
disbursement of which could have been compromised by a faulty
divorce. One of them may have been anticipating remarriage, which
would have been rendered invalid if the divorce was faulty, or at any
rate made more difficult if he or she had not removed any suspicion
of adultery.

Their decision as non-citizens to use a Roman
legal document is an example of how adaptable Roman provincial law
was to the needs of people, including non-citizens. Only five years
later, the Constitutio Antoniniana would make concrete what
had already started to happen in the legal world--everyone was
becoming Roman.18
Acozzis, a non-Roman woman acting without a guardian, participated in
Roman law just like a man, despite her illiteracy and “the
infirmity of her gender.”19

Acozzis’ divorce is notable for two
non-citizens using a Roman legal document. Moving forward in time to
AD 232, P.Dura 30 records the marriage of two citizens.20
The background to the agreement is as follows: a soldier named
Aurelius Alexander and a widow named Aurelia Marcellina married at
the winter quarters of the Cohors Duodecima, just outside the city.
From their names, both parties were clearly citizens from recently
enfranchised families. The document was found at Dura-Europos,
perhaps because it was deposited there with the local authorities.

Aurelius Alexander may have come from the area,
if troops were employed locally for the Parthian war;21
from his name we can be sure at least that he is from the Eastern
half of the Empire. His new wife, Aurelia, is named as the daughter
of Marcellinus, and she is said to have married in the presence of
her mother and her brother, Agrippinus. It has been suggested that
Marcellina was a local woman, but the fact that the rest of her
family has Latin names raises the possibility that she or her family
came originally from the West.22
This possibility is tempered, however, by the fact that she acted
independently: she simply married in the presence of her family, not
with their permission, and she had someone sign for her not in the
role of guardian, but simply because she was illiterate (ll.
36-38). Aurelia’s first husband is not named, but the fact that
her second marriage was to a soldier in the camp suggests that her
first husband was probably also in the military. We might surmise
that he was killed in action out East during the Parthian wars,
leaving Aurelia widowed and childless (no children are mentioned in
the document); marriage to one of his soldier comrades seems likely.

The contents of the document give little
indication of its provenance: we are told that it was drawn up in the
camp, where official documents were written in Latin, and at least
two of the witnesses’ signatures are in Latin (ll. 3 and
5 of the verso). But the rest is in Greek.23
The document could have come just as easily from Egypt as from a
Roman army camp: the core elements--a statement that the bride has
given herself (or been given) to the groom,24
a list of the dowry items, the obligations and expectations arising
from the union, and dispersal of the bride’s property in the
event of divorce--are found in Greek, Egyptian and Roman marriage
agreements. With the omission of any mention of the lex Julia,
which is found in other Roman documents, only the appearance of
stipulations alerts us to the fact that this was a document drawn up
under the period of Roman control. Curiously, in a break with the
tradition of Duran documents, P.Dura 30 contains consular
dating and the month in the Greek style, but it does not refer to the
old style of dating for the year. Perhaps some people at Dura were
less wedded to the old ways than were others.

As part of the marriage, Aurelius Alexander
receives dowry paraphernalia from his wife, all of which is assigned
a monetary value. Comparison with other documents shows us the
significance of the items. P.Oxy. 10.1273, an Egyptian
marriage document of AD 260, also contains a list of dowry items,
such as clothing, jewellery, and cash. P.Oxy. 49.3500, a
marriage document between two embalmers, dating to the 3rd century
AD, omits any mention of dowry items, presumably because the woman
had no items of value worth listing.25
The rest of this document, however, follows familiar lines--the woman
gives herself in marriage and responsibilities and penalties are
listed in the usual way. The omission or inclusion of dowry
paraphernalia offers an interesting insight into the financial status
of the documents’ parties. The quality and quantity of the
items in both documents, together with the fact that the clothing is
new, suggest that Aurelia Marcellina and the bride of P.Oxy.
10.1273 came from affluent families; the embalmer of P.Oxy.
49.3500 did not. The items themselves give us some idea of the
possessions that affluent women in places such as Dura-Europos could
expect to own, such as robes, tunics, and earrings. In P.Dura
30, we are reminded of the exoticism of the city in the phrase
Mediskia kai epikarsia kaina (l. 20), which seems to
describe silk and diagonally striped garments or fabric.26

Just as a divorce document was not required to
dissolve a union, so a marriage document was not needed to verify
one. So why did Aurelius Alexander and Aurelia Marcellina decide to
record their marriage in writing? One answer is that over time, the
practice of drawing up documents was becoming more popular: Acozzis
and Nabusamaus married without a document, but later divorced with
one. Perhaps the increased use of documents is a reflection of
growing Romanisation at the city. A second answer concerns wealth:
for couples like Aurelius Alexander and Aurelia Marcellina, who was
bringing a significant dowry with her, a document not only made the
union public, but also protected the weaker party, who was usually
the woman.

Continuing the theme of protection afforded by
legal documents, I turn to an undertaking between two women, P.Dura
29.27
It dates to 251 and is a deposit agreement between a local woman, who
may or may not have been a citizen, Amaththabeile, and a Roman
citizen, Aurelia Gaia. The text of the papyrus is a double document,
the upper text retaining only the date and title, the lower text
containing the agreement in full. Amaththabeile, whose Semitic name
means “servant of Bel”, was
probably not from citizen stock, although her father may have become
a citizen in 212. (I find it strange that space was left in line 5
for his name--perhaps there were problems transliterating from
Syriac.) The other party was Aurelia Gaia. We know from her name that
she was certainly of citizen stock and was most likely descended from
Greek colonists: her father’s name suggests that the family was
associated with the garrison.28

The difference in the two women’s status
is reflected in the agreement they undertook: Aurelia Gaia was able
to safeguard Amaththabeile’s one hundred denarii--the
sum is given in line 7--and so she lived in property secure enough to
look after a sum that could have purchased as much as 100kg of salt
or wheat or 100 pints of oil in AD 251;29
Amaththabeile did not live in such a property. It is interesting to
see that the silver was of good quality, that is, it had been tested
for purity: the inflation of the third century was clearly a problem
in Dura-Europos. I am curious to know how Amaththabeile came upon
such a large sum of money. She may have been saving up her wages and
now had amassed enough money to make deposit a necessary undertaking.
But given the evidence that most people lived at subsistence level,
it is most likely that she came by the money through inheritance or
sale of a property.

What was Aurelia doing taking Amaththabeile’s
money? She certainly was not a banker: this is a document recording a
simple deposit, so no rate of interest is mentioned. Besides, women
were not allowed to act as bankers, that is, to lend money with
interest, and presumably they were not allowed to look after others’
money and add interest in return for the opportunity to invest it.30
But Aurelia could have used Amaththabeile’s money for
investment without paying out interest, which would still have
offered lucrative business opportunities. Alternatively,
Amaththabeile may have been Aurelia’s freedwoman, and the
agreement was therefore based on duty rather than entrepreneurship.
Whichever it was, these women of different status came together to
use law--Aurelia acting like a Roman businessman or patron,
Amaththabeile taking advantage of the legal system (possibly the
system of another culture) to safeguard what little she had.

At lines 16 to 17 we are told that Aurelia
swore the Imperial oath--she would probably have sworn by the Greek
god Zeus and by the genius of the Roman Emperor, another nice example
of the flexibility of Roman institutions. She swore to the amount
that was deposited and to her receipt of it. Amaththabeile did not
swear anything, nor did anyone write for her. The differing levels of
the women’s engagement in the document may reflect their
differing status, and indeed if Amaththabeile were not a citizen, but
perhaps a Bedouin, she may not have been able to take the oath. It is
more likely, however, that this document follows other deposit
agreements, which were written from the position not of the
depositor, but of the recipient.31
So here, Aurelia alone agrees (l. 5) to the terms of the
contract.

Aurelia and Amaththabeile’s document
follows the format and basic concepts of a Roman deposit agreement,
but not the details. For no mention is made of whether the sum is to
be repaid with Amaththabeile’s original denarii, or with
money or goods of equivalent value. Greek law, which is probably the
influence here, makes no distinction; Roman law does.32
Nevertheless this document seems to have been legally valid in a
Roman city.

Like Acozzis, Aurelia Gaia and Amaththabeile
also acted without guardians. It is worth considering the possible
impact that the independence of women in Egypt and the Near East had
on women in the rest of the Empire. As provincial women came
increasingly to act without guardians, so guardianship for women of
Roman (or Greek) descent seemed unnecessary. Over time, the control
of a guardian became a legal fiction in so many cases that common
sense prevailed and the need for a guardian became obsolete
everywhere (though some women may have continued the tradition of
guardianship for social, rather than legal reasons).

My final document is P.Dura 28, a deed
of sale drawn up in AD 243 just outside the city. It is the
embodiment of Duran diversity: though written in Syriac, it contains
features usually found in Greek-law documents and was lodged with the
Roman authorities.33
The sale was of a female slave, Amath-Sin, who had been captured,
presumably from the Parthian East. The seller was Marcia Aurelia,
daughter of Samenbaraz and granddaughter of Abgar; the purchaser was
Lucius Aurelius Tiro, son of Bar-Belsamen. The contrast between the
Roman names of the parties and the Semitic names of the parents is
striking. Given that the document dates to 31 years after the
Constitutio Antoniniana, it is odd that the fathers’
names lack Roman praenomina, since they should have been
citizens: adoption of the Roman naming system seems not to have been
universal upon the promulgation of the Constitutio. By the
second generation of citizenship, however, all trace of Duran
ancestry had been erased.34
But Romanisation was by no means complete: the opening date of this
document retains some local flavour, as Roman consular dating is
followed by the month and year according to the Babylonian calendar
and then by the number of years after the foundation of the nearby
colony Antoniniana Edessa.

The expression of the document is decidedly
non-Greek: the transaction is undertaken from the point of view of
the seller, and some of the phrasing is Syriac in style. Some of the
contents are also alien to the Greco-Roman world: the actual handing
over (traditio) of the slave is omitted, as are penalties for
breaking the terms of the agreement (though the condition of the
slave is insured for six months from the date of sale).35
The rest of the contents, however, could have come from a document
written in Greek. On the basis of the three documents I have
described above, we should not now be surprised to find a Greek-style
document from this city even in the Roman period. Still, the language
of the document remains surprising. Why would such obviously
Romanised parties choose Syriac over Greek? It is possible that one
of the parties, probably Marcia, understood neither Greek nor Latin
and therefore chose Syriac to make sure she knew what had been signed
in her name. But if this were true, it is curious that we do not have
more documents from Dura-Europos and surrounding sites in Syriac,
which must have remained the primary language for many, if not most
of the population.

Marcia acted independently, her husband signing
for her only because she was illiterate. Welles et al. claim that it
is odd for a civilian woman to be selling a captive slave to a
soldier. They surmise that Tiro was a military man from his cognomen,
which was often used by soldiers, and from the fact that his
citizenship dates to before 212, given that his praenomen is
Lucius, rather than Aurelius.36
Even if Tiro was a former soldier, what was odd about the situation?
It is well-known that soldiers kept slaves, who at Dura-Europos could
have acted either as personal servants or as household workers.
Soldiers and former soldiers may have had access to slaves through
the camp, but they may also have chosen to buy trained slaves through
their contacts with civilians. At the age of twenty-eight, it is
unlikely that Tiro purchased the slave for her looks, but her skills
may have been useful. Moreover, Marcia, though a woman, was certainly
able to sell her property. This document sheds light on the networks
between individuals of different ethnicities and professions at
Dura-Europos, and shows that women were very much part of those
networks.37

All the women in these documents--Acozzis,
Aurelia Marcellina, Amaththabeile and Aurelia Gaia, and Marcia
Aurelia--lived in a Roman city, with a Roman governing authority, and
for practical reasons they used documents agreeable to local
government officials, because their provisions would be intelligible
to anyone and valid anywhere in the Roman Empire. As Hannah Cotton
has said of the Babatha archive, “there
is nothing in the documents … to suggest that recourse to
Roman law and Roman courts was anything but voluntarily adopted.
Without coercion or attempts to impose uniformity, the very presence
of the Romans as the supreme authority in the province invited
appeals to their authority, to their courts as well as to their
laws.”38

Durans were ethnically diverse: they wrote in
Syriac, Greek and Latin, and came from different ethnic and cultural
backgrounds. Throughout this paper, I have remarked on the fact that
the provisions of Duran legal documents differed from those we would
expect in Roman law, but that there are also striking similarities
between Duran documents and those found elsewhere in the Greco-Roman
world. In the Roman period, what was the law at Dura-Europos?

The evidence of the Greek-language documents in
the Babatha archive suggests that in a society where legal documents
were written either in a local language, such as Syriac, or in Greek,
the documents in Greek bore no signs of any law except Greek law.39
Even documents written in Syriac followed for the most part Greek
legal provisions. Applying this theory to Dura-Europos, we may
conclude that the law in the Greek-language documents such as P.Dura
29 and 31 was also Greek, but it was acceptable to the Roman
authorities because it did not undermine any Roman law.

Welles, who supplied an overview to law at
Dura-Europos in the first published compilation of the Duran
documents, declared that law in the city was Greek. He described the
law of the Hellenistic world as “varying in many ways from
place to place but meeting the needs of the business men who were not
tied to one community, but travelled and traded throughout the
Mediterranean.”40
While travelling traders certainly benefited from the flexibility of
Greek law, locals, such as Marcia Aurelia, more often benefited: at
Dura-Europos she was able to draw up a document in a local language
that contained long-established provisions, which were agreeable to
the Roman authorities. Marcia should have been grateful to the Romans
for adopting the flexibility of Greek law.

By piecing together the Greek and Roman law
elements of extant documents from Dura-Europos, we can start to have
an idea of what legal provisions, strictures and procedures formed
part of provincial Roman law in this city. But without a provincial
edict from Syria, or a local municipal edict comparable to the
Spanish lex Irnitana, we cannot know exactly which laws were
applied there to such topics as inheritance and property or
guardianship and manumission.41
Although we will probably never have such evidence, the contents of
the parchments and papyri do perhaps suggest that, contrary to the
lex Irnitana, law in the East adhered less to the Roman law
known from the jurists than it did in Spain. Still, our lack of
evidence for provincial edicts and local custom across the Empire, as
well as the general paucity of evidence for legal documents in Italy,
means that our ability to define Roman law is very difficult.42

Private law documents did not have to follow
Roman law as presented by Roman legislation and the jurists (though
they could not contradict it), yet Roman legal processes could be
applied to them if something went wrong. So, for example, Babatha had
two guardians for her son, a practice local to Arabia, rather than
one, which was the Roman practice. But when she suspected the two
guardians of withholding maintenance money from her son, she launched
before the governor an actio tutelae--a Roman-law
procedure--against them.

The women at Dura-Europos were merely drawing
up documents. The widespread adoption of the Greek language for legal
documents at Dura-Europos and the city’s domination by the
Seleucids gave prominence to Greek law in private documents. In
documents of the Roman period, there were Roman touches, but these
were not matters of strict law (they included dates and stipulations)
and they probably mattered little to the women, who were concerned
only that their documents were effective. The Syriac and Roman-law
elements in the Duran documents are so few that legally-uneducated
parties probably had no clear idea what legal system they were using.

Few people--women or men--at Dura-Europos would
have known of any Roman legislation, or leges. Any knowledge
they had would have come from previous experience and would have been
in the form, “Such-and-such a lex
allows me to do this.” While Durans’
knowledge of Roman lex was lacking, their understanding of ius
may have been more developed--they knew what at Dura was right and
wrong, and what was allowed and disallowed;43
they had a basic understanding of how to have legal documents drawn
up and how to go to court. For Durans, law did not consist of leges
and jurists’ interpretations. Their conception of law was as a
nexus of rights, customs, prohibitions, and procedures, and when it
was overseen by Roman officials, it was Roman law.44

Romans believed that the Twelve Tables were
compiled after consideration of Solon’s legislation--that they
were not put together in cultural isolation. Whether or not that was
true, Roman law certainly came to embody the diversity of the
Empire--it could be used by almost anyone, in either Latin or Greek,
and it could adapt to local law and custom. It comprised different
elements in different provinces and municipia. As Welles et
al. remark of P.Dura 30, “If
our text must be regarded as Roman in the sense that it is an
agreement between Roman citizens concluded in a Roman environment
under the provisions of Roman provincial law prescribed by the Roman
governor, it is evident that this is purely ius gentium.”45
As was the case with religion, so with law too the Romans found
assimilation more effective than imposition.

The Duran documents provide evidence for women
of different socio-economic status and ethnicity using
legal documents to be lodged with the Roman authorities. They provide
evidence that law gave women the opportunity to act outside
their stereotyped gender role by enabling them to take control of
their own relationships and finances, and by guaranteeing legality of
that control. It is highly significant that the women at Dura-Europos
acted independently. It was precisely this departure from standard
Roman legal practice that, ironically, provided these women with
greater opportunities to lodge documents that were compatible with
Roman law with the Roman legal authorities.46
Whether or not Duran women knew the jurists’ strictures against
women acting without guardians, they were otherwise using Roman law,
which at Dura-Europos gave diverse peoples the chance to marry, to
divorce, to conduct business--to live as a community.

1
These documents are to be found in Welles, Fink and Gilliam, with
accompanying translations and comments. The texts can also be viewed
online in the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP), available
on the Perseus website
(http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_DDBDP.html).
I am using the texts in the DDBDP, which differ occasionally from
those published by Welles et al. I include links below to each
document individually.

In
the consulship of Lucius Fabius
Cilo for the second time and of Flavius Annius
Libo; in the twelfth year of the reign of
Imperator Caesar Lucius Septimius Severus Pertinax Augustus, the
tenth of Marcus Aurelius (25) Antoninus Augustus, and the
seventh of Lucius Septimius Geta Caesar, his sons, Augusti;
in the year 515 of the former reckoning, on the fourth of the
month Artemisius, in the village
Ossa, before the witnesses who have signed below.
Nabusamaus, son of Conon and grandson of Abissaeus, and Acozzis,
daughter of Seleucus and granddaughter of Abissaeus,
(30) both of the people of the village
Ossa, stating that they had been married previously under an oral
agreement, and then they have had no children,
and there is now a lack of amiable cooperation in their
union, have acknowledged that they are
separating from each other and that they gave each other permission
and power, Nabusamaus
(35) on the one hand to Acozzis to
live with any other man whom she chooses, and
Acozzis on the other hand to Nabusamaus to
marry any other woman whom
he wishes, and that they neither accuse nor will accuse each other,
neither concerning their union nor on
account of their heirs nor with reference to any other
instrument written(40) in their name
(if any written instrument has existed or been composed previously),
while this agreement remains valid
wherever it may be produced--in good faith
they have questioned each other and have agreed with each other--nor
onany pretext nor concerning anything
else (45) altogether; ifone of
them does make such accusation, (they have
agreed that) the charge will be invalid
and he will pay without legal argument or decision to the other a
penalty of 3,000 denarii of silver and a like amount to the Fiscus,
while this contract will continue valid nevertheless.
Witnesses: Zabinas son of Adaeus, Abissaeus (50) son of
Abissaeus.

(3rd hand) I, Nabusamaus,
son of Conon, the above, agree and approve according to what has
been written above.

(4th hand) I, Barnaeus,
son of Lysias, on request, have written for my mother Acozzis,
and she, the above, agrees and (55) approves.

The documents
of the Babatha archive are collected as P.Babatha, sometimes
also called P.Yadin. On this collection, see Lewis. The
P.Euphrates collection is discussed by Feissel
and Gascou 1989 and 1995.

6
A divorce document that does provide detailed discussion of the
division of property is P.Kron. 52
(http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.05.0146&layout=&loc=52,
translated at Rowlandson 130-31), dating to AD 138. In this
agreement, the couple had married without written agreement, a
Greco-Syrian practice seen also in Acozzis’ document. There is
no mention of any blame, and the wife, who acts with a guardian, is
given permission to remarry. The division of property is
sufficiently complex to have merited a separate document, as
probably happened in the case of Acozzis.

Vandorpe,
especially 329-31. I am grateful to Maryline Parca for the
reference. For some of the texts of Apollonia’s archive in
translation, see Rowlandson 105-12. On guardianship in Egypt, see
also Sheridan.

18
Indeed, before 212, the Praetor’s Edict, by means of a legal
fiction, allowed peregrini to go to law against citizens by
regarding them as Roman for the duration of the legal process.

19
It is worth remembering that many men who appear in legal documents
were also illiterate. Illiterate parties, whether male or female,
would have someone write and sign on their behalf, and there are
many, many examples of this practice.

On the outside of the
roll: In the consulship of Virius Lupus and Marius Maximus, on the
Calends of October, in the first day of the month of Hyperberetaeus,
in the winter camp at Qatna of the Twelfth Cohort …….
Palestinian of Alexander Severus.

(5) “Good
luck!

There have acknowledged
and contracted with each other on the present day Aurelius
Alexander, soldier of the above cohort and of the century of Papius,
and Aurelia Marcellina, daughter of Marcellinus, resident in Qatna,
in the presence of her mother …..na and her brother
Agrippinus: (10) Marcellina, on the one hand, to have given
herself from widowhood into the community of marriage …….
with the above Alexander, and that there remain for them for all
[time ………], bringing with her out of her
possessions, appraised by garment and item, the intermediaries being
qualified men, the following things: a white, new cloak of the value
of 1[2]5 denarii; (15) another white, new cloak, of the value
of 50 denarii; a ……… tunic, new, worth 40
denarii; a dalmatic robe, undyed, new, worth 30 denarii; a scarlet
dalmatic robe and purple hood, new, worth 75 denarii; another white,
new dalmatic robe, worth 50 denarii; a ………,
purple, new, worth 25 denarii; (20) silken and striped
stuffs, new, worth 50 denarii; crockery and bronze utensils, worth
25 denarii; earrings and fingerrings, ………,
worth 50 denarii; (in addition?), the 565 denarii of silver brought
by her; (all of which?) the above Alexander has acknowledged to have
received and to hold (with?) his own possessions, namely the ………
things, (25) and to be content, also, with what comes to him
………… to owe 175 denarii …………
dowry (amounting to) 750 denarii of silver, it having been agreed
between them [that if] the above Alexander wishes to divorce the
above Marcellina because of (30) ………………………and
the property ……………… (as?)
(35) it was agreed between them, arose, if anyone ……
either ……….

23
Military documents from Dura-Europos are written in Latin. The
private nature of this document most likely explains why it was
written in Greek.

24
The combination of a traditional style of document, in which the
bride is the object of transaction in the marriage, and the
less-universal independence of the bride, who is one of the parties
to the transaction, results in the bride “giving
herself into matrimony, she is at once the giver and the gift”
(Welles 12).

(1st hand)In the
consulship of the Third and the First, on the sixth day
before the Nones of October; and
in the year 562 of the former reckoning,
the second day of the month
Hyperberetaeus, in ………. Aurelia Gaia, Daughter
of Saturnilus, of Dura, resident in that place, ………….
(5) has acknowledged to Amaththabeile (blank space), of Dura,
also resident in that place, that she has been paid and has
got from her (Amaththabeile) as a deposit,
free from all risk, on this day,
100 denarii of good legal silver, without
deduction or addition, which she will keep
with her and as part of her property and will return it to the above
Amaththabeile whenever …………
she is asked to do so,(10) without
delay or postponement; if,demand
having been made, she fails to
return (the money), she shall be held
liable to the penalties specified for those who violate the security
of deposits, and the right of exaction
shall devolve upon the above Amaththabeile
and anyone else who validly presents this
document in her behalf both from Gaia herself and
from her property, in every manner and way.
[In good] faith (15) the above Gaia
has been asked by Amaththabeile and
has acknowledged that she has been paid and has got in
deposit from the above Amaththabeile the
designated 100 denarii and will return them whenever she is
asked, and she has sworn the imperial oath
that these things are truly thus [….. and ?] given.

(2nd
hand) I, Aurelius Theodorus, son of Bernicianus, of Zeugma,
resident in that place, on request have
written (20) for Aurelia Gaia, who is
illiterate, but acknowledges that she has got as deposit 100
denarii which she will also return whenever she
is asked.

I have taken
figures from the Edict on Maximum Prices, then multiplied by 10 on
the basis of the rate of inflation in Duncan-Jones’ wheat
prices (151-54).

30
Women not allowed to be bankers: D 2.13.12 Feminae remotae
videntur ab officio argentarii, cum ea opera virilis sit (women
seem to be barred from the office of banker, since this work belongs
to men).

There is
disagreement on this vexed point: see Crook 209. D 16.3.1.40
and 16.3.24, however, suggest that Romans did distinguish between
return of goods and return of equivalent value.

33
For the full text and translation of this document, see Welles 142
ff. The DDBDP gives only the two lines of Greek, omitting the
Syriac, so for the full text, see Welles 142ff. On this text, see
also Bellinger and Welles, who discuss the Greek and Syriac legal
influences on the document. The following translation also comes
from Welles.

“In the sixth year
of the Imperator Caesar Marcus Antonius Gordianus Pius Felix
Augustus; in the consulship of Annius Arrianus and Cervonius Papus;
in the month Iyar of the year 554 of the former reckoning; and in
the year 31 of the freedom of the renowned Antoniana Edessa, Colonia
Metropolis Aurelia Alexandria; in the residence of Marcus Aurelius
Antiochus, eques Romanus, son of Belsu; and in the second term as
strategus of Marcus Aurelius Abgar, eques Romanus, son of Ma’nu,
grandson of Agga, and of Abgar, son of Hafsai, grandson of Bar-KMR;
on the 9th day of the aforesaid month.

The defendant, Marcia
Aurelia, daughter of Samenbaraz, granddaughter of Abgar, the seller,
declares to Lucius Aurelius Tiro, son of Bar-Belsamen, of Carrhae: I
have received from him 700 denarii and have sold to him Amath-Sin,
my female slave, a purchase, whose age is twenty-eight years, more
or less, a captive; in such wise that from this day and for all the
future you, Tiro, the buyer, and your heirs, shall have full power
over this slave whom I have sold to you, to possess and to govern
and to do with her whatever you may wish; and if any man shall
contend or talk against Tiro, the buyer, or against his heirs, as to
the title (?) to this slave whom I have sold to him, then I, the
defendant, the seller, or my heirs, will oppose this claim and clean
and clear the property, and I shall establish it for the good of
Tiro, the buyer. It is not lawful in any way to alter this contract.
I sell to you this slave while I confirm a certain law, so that from
now on to the expiration of six months they are protected, and so it
has been agreed between them. If this slave shall run away, however,
from this day forward it shall be at the cost of Tiro, the buyer.

Two documents of this
sale have been written: one copy, retained for record, is to be put
into the archives of the renowned Antoniniana Edessa, and the other
…………….. shall be in the
possession of Tiro, the buyer.

I, Aurelius Hafsai, son
of Samasyabh, Edessene of the Twelfth Tribe, declare that I have
written in behalf of the defendant, Aurelia, my wife, in the
subscription of the document, because she is illiterate, who
acknowledges that she has sold this slave of hers and has received
the price thereof, according to what is written above.

Marcus Aurelius, son of
Bel-Bussurabal.

Marcus Aurelius, son of
Panu-adaggal (?).

With the signature of the
inspector of documents: ‘I, Aurelius Mannus, superintendent of
the sacred and civic archives, bear witness.’

I, Marcus Aurelius Belsu,
son of Muqimu, the scribe, have written this contract.”

Verso

Aurelia, the defendant,
daughter of Samnai, the seller, testifies for herself.

I, Aurelius Hafsai, son
of Samasyabh, have set my seal to this document.

Abgar the strategos:
“Aurelius Abgar, the strategos, testifies.”

Abgar, son of Barsamya,
testifies.

Aurelia, the defendant,
daughter of Samnai, the seller, testifies for herself.

34
It is possible, of course, that Marcia and Tiro’s fathers had
died before 212 and so never taken on Roman names.

36
Welles 143. Earlier, Bellinger and Welles (120) had suggested that
Tiro was a slave dealer.

37
For a very basic introduction to women in the Near East, see Ilse
Seibert, Women in the Ancient Near East (New York 1974). Much
work has been done on women and the law in this region before the
Roman period: see the recent book by Sophie Lafont, Femmes,Droit et Justice dans l’Antiquité orientale
(Göttingen 1999) and her copious bibliography. There seems,
however, to be no good recent treatment of Syrian women and the law
under the period of Roman control.

Inheritance
and property were probably covered by Cicero’s edict for
Cilicia. On the possible contents of provincial edicts, see
Galsterer, especially 17-19. Guardianship and manumission are topics
in the lex Irnitana, on which see Gonzalez.

See Cotton
101 n. 90. It is possible that even with a much larger body of
material we would still be unable to define Roman law in the East,
since Roman legal practice in that part of the Empire may have been
so flexible that it could adapt according to the needs of various
groups, communities, periods and issues.

44
There were probably very few people in the Roman Empire who had
knowledge of leges or even access to compilations of them.
Lawyers would most likely have had a rudimentary knowledge of them,
at least enough to give the impression of knowledge and so convince
a judge, while notaries and other composers of legal documents
probably understood general procedure well, but relied on templates
to supply details for special cases.

46
I am not suggesting that women acting with guardians were denied
access to law, but that they could not necessarily conduct their
legal affairs exactly as they wished. Nor am I suggesting that the
adaptability of Roman law and its ability to blend with local
procedure benefited only women: some of the documents I have
discussed in this paper feature men, as well as women, and they
would also have appreciated that Roman law allowed them to conduct
their legal affairs following familiar practices and procedures.